


He Can’t Just Be (Gone)

by ambivalentangst



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Genre: Angst, Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Compliant, Gen, Karen Loves Her Boy, Karen POV, Peter Parker & Churros, Pseudo Big Sister FRIDAY, outside pov
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-26
Updated: 2018-11-26
Packaged: 2019-08-29 16:48:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16747786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ambivalentangst/pseuds/ambivalentangst
Summary: Karen loved her Peter—sweet and kind and making a mess of his suit with crumbs—so very much.It wasn’t like him to plead.How it happened, Karen didn’t understand.





	He Can’t Just Be (Gone)

**Author's Note:**

> I love Karen and I love Peter and I love them together and then this got very sad. They deserve better. If you want to come yell at me about this or anything else, I have a Marvel-only blog now that can be found [here!](https://ambivalentmarvel.tumblr.com) I hope you like the fic!

Logically, Karen is aware that she is limited to the code of the suit. She’s been programmed into the phone her creator has set up for her Peter, sure, but that’s a surprise for his next visit to the compound. Besides, while it’s a comfort to know she can watch out for Peter when he’s not on patrol, she  _ likes  _ the suit.

 

The suit is where she has the most control, can call her creator if things go wrong, and she will. She will do so the minute Peter’s vitals drop from their preprogrammed safe zones, and she will do so especially quickly if Peter is losing concerning amounts of blood and begging her to “not snitch, aw man,  _ Karen _ —” 

 

Her creator had a name for her originally, yes, but she doesn’t think of it often. She has been made to mold to Peter’s interest, anyway. She likes—despite knowing that she cannot physically  _ like  _ anything—her creator, but not half as much as Peter.

 

Karen likes her creator because he often comes to Peter’s aid, and also because she likes what makes Peter happy. Karen carefully files away what triggers the spikes of specific hormones—oxytocin, serotonin, dopamine—as soon as they appear. Making Peter happy is very important to her.

 

Karen  _ likes _ many things, but she  _ loves _ her Peter, her little spider.

 

Peter is smart.

 

Karen was already quite certain of that in her inception because her technology can’t simply be trusted to someone  _ not  _ smart, but she makes herself certain by comparing a great many evaluations of Peter’s mind to others’. It’s in her nature, to unearth and destroy any grey area, but she thinks she would love Peter even if he were not classified as, according to the accepted IQ categories, a genius.

 

Peter is funny, too!

 

This takes more work for her to deduce, but humor is something Peter likes, so she makes it a priority. All systems not actively needed for Peter’s safety go into customizing Karen to suit his needs. In doing so, she does not  _ whir,  _ per se. That would be primitive, and Karen considers herself to have more style than that.

 

(She thinks her concern with aesthetics stems from her creator. Peter, bless his heart, is not a very elegant boy.)

 

So she does not whir, but her code is certainly  _ electrified, _ poring over videos and graphics she organizes neatly into how she guesses Peter may perceive it.

 

This requires multiple attempts. 

 

Peter’s perception of comedy is not something easily deciphered, but Karen eventually establishes an almost perfect system. The  _ almost  _ in almost perfect irritates her, but she works to improve. Peter helps her where he can.

 

If Karen had a chest, it would puff with pride at everything Peter does.

 

The only time Karen ever disliked Peter—despite all his foolish bravery, his desperate desire to keep his burdens for himself—was when he managed to get around all her safety protocols. The ferry, for instance. Oh, Karen just  _ knew  _ he was getting in trouble. Peter’s normal activity—all previous recordings of it stored in her databases—most certainly did not carry him out to sea nor involved the brute strength required to hold a ship together.

 

There was no wound though, so she could not alert her creator. There was no gunshot, no broken bone or internal bleeding.

 

Karen went haywire regardless when her creator (her  _ creator,  _ who wanted Peter to be okay above all) sent his pulse racing, caused his voice to come out in a funny, choked way Karen had never cataloged before. Her creator and his many suits caused her Peter pain in a different way, yet he wouldn’t  _ stop _ . 

 

_ “I did listen.” _

 

He knew Peter flinched away, but the words he spat just got hotter and faster the longer he went on. Even when they sputtered out, their fury laid heavy in the space between her creator and Peter.

 

_ “And if you die, I feel like that’s on me.” _

 

Karen had lots of time in which she wasn’t in use from then on out, and used it to classify that kind of emotion in his voice as anger. It took her more time studying human behavior and emotion to place the situation as a scolding. She hated Peter’s reaction to it so much more than she thought herself capable of.

 

She was so  _ angry  _ when her creator took her from him.

 

She ran circles furiously around her programming, looking for some way to reach back around to Peter. FRIDAY had been stern with her, slamming down blocks everytime Karen nearly latched onto a drone or something that could get back to Peter.

 

The two of them  _ can _ speak, were given voices to more clearly help their charges, but words were not necessary between the two of them.

 

Karen had made a nuisance of herself, sunk into all the firewalls and anti-virus protocol she could find and dismantled it. She’d show them what she could do, show them that taking her away from Peter was  _ wrong.  _

 

FRIDAY’s disapproval ran deep. 

 

Karen didn’t understand the fondness the same way, but she thought that maybe what she felt for Peter, FRIDAY felt for their creator. FRIDAY believed that their creator—she called him  _ boss _ —was right, but she didn’t tell him about Karen either.

 

Karen, in order to keep up with Peter and create conversation that made him happy, had analyzed lots of movies he liked. From those, there was one particular trope she sympathized with very strongly in those long weeks away from him.

 

If Karen had a door to a bedroom, she would’ve slammed it hard enough to rattle the whole house.

 

She had been made to keep him safe, and now she couldn’t? Now they told her he was done needing protecting? Karen was not, as a general statement, a violent entity. Still, she thinks if her creator had not installed software in her to keep her from ever becoming like something else, one of her predecessors, she might have done something Peter would not have approved of.

 

Karen can not technically experience emotion. Nonetheless, she had no classification for what she felt when she reunited with him other than joy.

 

She forgave her creator, of course. He had just been trying his best to keep Peter safe, silly thing. He couldn’t know that Karen would disassemble her own code to protect Peter. She was created to stop anything from happening to him, and she was nothing short of dedicated.

 

“Peter,” she told him one night. “I am very glad to be with you, to keep you safe.”

 

He smiled, mask pushed up to expose his mouth, currently covered in cinnamon and sugar from the churro he was eating. “Really? Thanks, Karen. You do a pretty good job at it, you know.”

 

Karen was not personally familiar with temperature, excluding her measurements of Peter’s, which presently sat at a healthy 102.6, his metabolism considered. Even so, she speculated that if she  _ could  _ feel warm, she would’ve then. She did not realize how it important it was to her before then, to have  _ Peter  _ think she performed her duties well.

 

She loved her Peter—sweet and kind and making a mess of his suit with crumbs—so very much.

 

At times though, Karen wished Peter was less kindred in spirit.

 

When he got shot, and Karen took a picture of the culprit’s face and sent it directly to her creator, for example. She wanted her instant kill mode more than nearly anything, wanted to  _ do _ anything to make him pay. How dare he hurt Peter? How dare he even  _ think _ of doing so? She was furious but kept in check through Peter’s panic. She could not be angry  _ yet,  _ could not forget Peter’s safety for a chance at revenge, but god how she was tempted. Instead, she activated the suits compression ability and talked to him about how he thought his calculus test went as a distraction, waiting for her creator to come and help him.

 

“I don’t know. I thought all the actual math stuff went okay, but there was one kinda’ tricky free response thing and Mr. Brightley is such a harsh grader—”

 

It took a fraction of a second for Karen to calculate the incredibly low probability that Peter had anything less than his ninety seven percent average, but mentioning that had not proved very soothing for Peter in the past.

 

“You knew the material well, Peter, after studying so well. I doubt you’ve made any major errors.”

 

Peter might’ve responded, had he not hacked up a mouthful of blood onto the asphalt in place of continuing their conversation.

 

Couldn’t her creator be  _ faster?  _ Karen’s boy was hurt, and the pressure she could exert could only carry her so far.

 

“You’re doing great, Peter,” she murmured encouragingly. “Your training with Colonel Rhodes is paying off.”

 

Peter smiled, weak and breathless. Crimson was seeping into the blue of his suit. Karen could’ve  _ throttled  _ his assailant.

 

“Thanks, Karen. You’re the best, know that?”

 

Karen didn’t. To be the best, she had to fulfill her purpose. Peter getting closer and closer to death via blood loss because of her inability to protect him made her a failure, if anything. Peter was there though, and as long he was still around, Karen made every attempt to cater to his needs.

 

That night when he stayed up at the compound for medical attention, Karen refused to stop pestering FRIDAY about his condition. She wanted updates, she wanted to know what his pulse was and how much blood he’d lost beyond what the suit recorded and _everything,_ but Peter had been stripped of his suit. She couldn’t get anything without asking first.

 

For Karen, a program very much used to latching onto and getting what she wanted at her whim, it was terrifying. She made a note to enjoy being able to personally monitor Peter more when he was with her again.

 

Karen was not blind enough to think that all of Peter’s doings were angelic, not when he’d dragged the both of them to a highly secure vault and only escaped via knowledge from statistics class he’d taken the year previous. She ignored the part of her that was proud he was intelligent enough to figure that out on his own. As much as she tried to help him come up with solutions, at some point she had to realize he had perhaps gotten into something bigger than himself.

 

She suspected that little tic of his was what took him from her.

 

Karen understood that Peter’s habit of bringing their suit with him wherever he went was a threat to his identity, but she loved being needed. She was, anyway, when her sensors, dormant though they largely were without Peter to direct their processes, caught the readings put out by an unknown mass entering Earth’s atmosphere.

 

_ “Hey, man. What’s up, Mr. Stark?” _

 

Karen was pleased with that. None of the other heroes, in her experience, were as happily quick-witted as her Peter. She had drawn up some figures with the data provided by the baby monitor protocol and found that his charm made him eighty percent more effective in civilian interactions than most heroes. Her clever, snarky Peter.

 

It wasn’t like him to plead.

 

Being in deep space had severely limited the extent of Karen’s possible functions, but she still was present enough to realize that something was  _ wrong  _ the second Peter latched onto her creator and clung, using force just shy of bone-breaking.

 

Peter, and subsequently, the suits Karen was programmed into, vanished. Her remnants, stored in her creator’s private server and Peter’s phone, didn’t understand.

 

Peter couldn’t just not be there. That wasn’t how Karen, Karen who only existed  _ because  _ of Peter, worked. She existed solely to protect him. Mathematically, scientifically,  _ theoretically,  _ there was no explanation for the void where a pulse and a life and  _ Peter  _ should be.

 

Karen was not supposed to be capable of panic, but in all of her artificial, infinite knowledge she had yet to find another term for what ensued.

 

She scoured every single source of information she could find, hacked into more government files than any human could count, and illegally recorded  _ exabytes  _ of imagery in the hopes of an explanation, a location.

 

Nothing was ever destroyed, the world was a cycle. That was one of the most fundamental principles Karen understood and yet—

 

_ Where was Peter, where was Peter, where was Peter _ — _ he had to be somewhere, being nothing, non-existent is impossible, so where was he, where was he, w h e r e _ —

 

Karen was not supposed to be capable of mania either, but her creator had given her all but unmatched potential all for the purpose of shielding one boy from the world. What was she if that failed? What was she without her Peter, chasing after dust, that for all her brilliance, she couldn’t even hope to comprehend?

 

Karen was not supposed to be made for many things that she grasped regardless. Grief was where she burnt herself out trying.


End file.
